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First of all, I'd like to express my deep gratidute to the author of this module, it is such a fun module to work with and to teach python as a first programming language.
Secondly, I would like to request a feature if it is not too hard to achieve. Currently, you can only write texts horizontally, no matter what is the current orientation of the turtle pen. I wonder if it is possible to write text in any direction when we control the heading of the turtle? For example, the following code would write a vertically oriented text:
>>> setheading(90) #turtle facing up
>>> write("vertical text!")
Thanks a lot!
Yingjie

Turtle is built on top of Tk, which is currently at version 8.5 - this has no ability to rotate text. When Tk version 8.6 arrives it should be able to write rotated text (see http://mail.python.org/pipermail/tkinter-discuss/2010-November/002490.html) and turtle.py could be updated to take advantage of it.

Could this now be implemented in the turtle module?

This would be a fun feature to add. The next step on this issue would be to determine if this can be accomplished with Tk 8.6.

c.create_text(100, 100, angle=90.0, text='test text')
is a tclerror in 8.5 and works in 8.6.

I don't think backwards compatibility matters too much for the turtle package but the way its proposed in the initial report makes it so that text in previous versions would now be angled to the turtle's heading.
To keep the previous behavior a keyword arg could be added but given that this package is mostly for learning and fun, that might complicate it a little.
Aside from that, the patch to add this is fairly trivial now.